Myanmar Using Controversial Law to Seize Land From Farmers

by admin on April 4, 2019

The Burmese government is using a controversial law as a means to steal land from farmers, many of who are ethnic minorities in the Southeast Asian nation.

The law called the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Lands Management Law is based on a British colonial-era law that deemed lands owned by indigenous peoples as “wasteland”, and therefore could be seized and used to extract resources.

In 2012, the Burmese dictatorship instead called the land “vacant, fallow, and virgin” to justify its stealing. The most recent regime of Aung San Suu Kyi made the law even stricter.

Now thousands of farmers are being arrested and evicted for their land even though many of them–95% by one study’s estimates–don’t even know the law exists in the first place and therefore, don’t know to get a permit to stay on the land.

There is, however, a right to habitation for persons squatting on another’s land for a long period of time.

To further complicate the plight of hill tribes using Thai public land, is that pursuant to mainstream Thailand history, Thai people themselves are the indigenous people of Thailand and hill tribes were migrants that arrived afterward.